We are still more than a year away from the 2018 election. With both parties still regrouping in the aftermath of 2016, and deeply divided, it is an open question what the major issues, messages and scandals will be. However, there is one thing we can already say with near certainty. The number of seats won by each party's candidates will not track the number of votes they received.

Despite strong anti-establishment sentiment, which contributed to Donald Trump’s election and Bernie Sanders’ strong primary performance, more than 98% of U.S. House members won re-election in November. Not only were most incumbents re-elected, they were re-elected by significantly more comfortable margins than in 2014. The “incumbency bump” -- our measure of the strength of congressional incumbents -- rebounded from a 20-year low of 2.55% in 2014 to 3.2%. In other words, incumbents earned an average of 3.2 percentage points more of the vote than the partisanship of their district suggests they would earn.

Last month, FairVote released its projections for the November 2018 U.S. House elections that will take place nearly two years from now. If every current incumbent (excluding the five members of the 115th Congress who have already vacated their seats) were to seek re-election, we can confidently project that at least 368 of them, 205 Republicans and 163 Democrats would win.

In 2010, the Supreme Court overturned the ban on corporate election spending in the landmark Citizens United case. As a majority of the justices considered political spending to be a form of free speech, corporations were free to ‘speak’, with the goal to persuade the voting public, through political contributions. Since then, the amount of money spent in elections has grown drastically, and the source of that money has become a key concern for many Americans. Many have become to wonder, with so much money involved, could our elections simply be ‘bought’?

The 2016 U.S. House election was a better election for incumbents than 2014, and one in which the nation was split down the middle. The incumbency bump added eight points to the average incumbent’s margin of victory and only 12 seats (3%) of seats changed hands.

If we want politics to reflect our better selves, Illinois leaders need to stop playing politics with district lines and give voters the freedom to choose candidates that best represent their voice no matter where they live.